The machine I have running mint is a fifteen year old Core 2 Duo T6600 laptop. Works great!

Land usage is also a huge concern with hydro power. Pumped hydro storage means permanently flooding an area to create the reservoir, which carries many above and beyond just the destruction of whatever was there before. The flooded land has vegetation on it, which is now decaying under water. This can release all sorts of unpleasantness, most notably mercury.

Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.

Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!

I’ve seen initial reports that at least on Steam Deck it’s far less impactful than any other recording solution available so far (decky recorder/obs/whatever). Like you though I’m interested to see a detailed look at how it does on a standard Windows gaming PC though, where you’ve already got well established low impact solutions like Shadowplay or Relive.

There are two factors.

First is simply the convenience of having it all built in to the gaming platform you’re using instead of juggling other software. Plus Steam will host content you want to share for you, which neither AMD nor Nvidia does. Also, neither AMD nor Nvidia’s offering providers a two hour rolling recording that you can just skim through and pick clips from at your leisure.

Second is the hope for better reliability. Shadowplay/replay/whatever nvidia is calling it now just stops working at random for a lot of people, myself included, with no warning or indication until you hit the “save replay” button and get a popup telling you that its not running. I also wrestled for a while with it recording the wrong screen when I had two monitors, so I’d just get clips of my second monitor desktop with the audio of the game. There are lots of people hoping that Steam will manage better.

In fairness to requiring “excellence”, I’d imagine most professionals have excellent skills in their field compared to the average person.

It kind of is. It’s just the thing being asserted without proof is the one-way speed of light. That you don’t seem to find that interesting I guess is where we differ.

Take 30 seconds to at least glance at the article the other user posted. It’s not just myself, there are plenty of very interested physicists who also find the unprovability of the one-way speed of light interesting.

I’m also not sure what your point about orange is supposed to be. Are you suggesting that there is a particular spectra of light that we cannot test?

My reason for being interested isn’t just that I think it’s “cool”. I think it’s fascinating that a fundamental underpinning of physics has such a gap in its experimental verifiability.

For no reason. No one is saying that it is different, only that it’s impossible to prove one way or the other. Light traveling the same speed in all directions, and light traveling at 2x c away from an observer and instantaneously on the return, and every other alternative that averages out to c for the round trip, are indistinguishable to any experiment we can conduct.

…but that’s exactly what you’re doing. The fact that light travels at the same speed in all directions cannot be proven. You’re the one insisting that it does.

Another interesting way to conceptualize it is that the speed of light is infinite and it’s causality/information that is limited to c. You shine a light at the moon and it takes 1.3 seconds for the “fact” that the light was turned on to propagate that far.

There’s no reason it wouldn’t be. The point is that it’s impossible to prove that it is. There is no conceivable experiment that can be performed to prove the two-way speed of light is symmetric.

I started watching Star Trek: The Animated Series. As a long time Trekkie who had never checked it out I expected it to be campy and ridiculous, and yes, the is some of that, but there’s also some surprisingly good writing in there.

I haven’t used the PlayStation or Xbox ones, but the Switch mobile device media transfer is remarkably awkward to use. The Switch will broadcast an ad hoc SSID which you can connect a device to and then hit a web server hosted by the Switch to get your pictures. As if that wasn’t already kind of awkward lots of phones will fight you on connecting to the SSID because it doesn’t have an internet gateway, so they consider it a bad connection and just automatically switch back to mobile data.

When I heard that BIOS updates were going out automatically via Windows update I had just assumed the devices in question must be using an A/B update scheme to prevent the risk of accidentally bricking the system, because obviously they should.

Absolutely insane that’s not the case.

Do you use it in dark mode with a completely black background and white text? You get pretty nasty retinal afterimages from closely clustered bright spots like that, and can make the center of your vision blurry/hazy for a few seconds to minutes. It’s a harmless temporary effect, but can be a minor annoyance.

Totally agree that a lot of them are poor implementations. Or just have a terrible UX such that it’s almost guaranteed that a layperson is going to set it up badly and have a degraded experience that they’ve convinced themselves is good. Obviously the “correct” thing to do is check every box for “enhancements”, right?

Gaming peripheral software supplied by the OEM being bad is probably the least surprising thing I’m likely to read all day.

As for stereo sounding better, I think in the purest sense that’s always going to be true. Any kind of processing is going to alter the audio to some degree away from the original “intent”. A pure triangle wave from a NES isn’t going to be a pure triangle wave after it goes through any HRTF, good, bad, or otherwise. If you want your sound to be clean then yes, avoid extra processing at all costs.

First, I apologise for assuming you were uninformed. That’s clearly not the case.

I agree that if a game has its own headphone surround solution then that’s preferable to anything external to the game. And yes, turning on both just mangles your sound and should not ever be done.

A theoretical game that doesn’t have its own HRTF doesn’t need to provide full soundscape details for a external virtual surround to work though. It just won’t be as good. If the game can output 7.1 audio but lacks HRTF for headphones the processor can at least use the surround channel positions to inform an HRTF, so that the right rear channel sounds like it’s behind you and to the right, etc. If the game is stereo only, maybe you want your NES emulator audio to sound like it’s coming from the screen in front of you instead of strapped to your head.

All that aside though, OP also didn’t mention games. Maybe he’s got some DTS7.1 movies he wants to watch, in which case HRTF by channel position is the only option.

You should read up on head related transfer functions. Virtual surround is much more than just “an audio equaliser that makes footsteps louder”.